How To Safely Put Up Your Christmas Tree with an Active Toddler

I was SO nervous to put up our Christmas tree with a 17 month old, but Mackenzie has surprised me and been amazing since it’s been up.

We have a faux Christmas tree that we’ve been putting up for 5 years now and it’s held up so well. We have also only ever had plastic ornaments because I was worried about breaking them myself so I never felt comfortable having an entire tree of glass ornaments.

This is our first year putting it up with an active toddler so I was worried about what Mackenzie would do with it. Greg and I put our tree up in front of Mackenzie, but decorated it with our ornaments while she was sleeping. When she woke up the next morning and saw the decorated tree she was super excited.

When she first saw it she was mesmerized by the lights, but also our tree topper which projects snowflakes on the ceiling (I think this was a helpful distraction to the ornaments). Then she noticed the ornaments and gently started touching a few. She never tried taking them off of the tree and I think it’s because she never saw them off the tree. Mackenzie is in a huge modeling phase, where she copies us a lot. Since she never saw us put the ornaments on or take them off the tree, she doesn’t yet know that they can come off (not yet anyway)!

When she’s old enough to help decorate the tree with us, we’ll let her help put ornaments on, but for now I enjoyed her seeing it as some sort of magic that the tree was decorated!

Some other ways I kept her from tugging at the tree is letting her create ornaments of her own and put them at a height where she can reach them. I’ll share some other ornament ideas to do with your child soon, but we created these handprint ornaments that now hang on our tree!

I’ve seen people put up baby gates around their tree to keep their toddlers from pulling at it. I’ve also seen people wrap very big boxes and placed them in front of the tree so their children couldn’t get close enough to touch it.

At the end of the day, you know your child best and what they’ll do with your Christmas tree. Sometimes you have to see what they’re going to do before putting up obstacles to hinder them from getting to the tree. Other times your child may surprise you and not do anything at all!

If you have a Christmas Tree up, how do you keep your active toddler from destroying it? Let me know some of your parenting hacks below.